[Fedora-xen] Minimal Fedora 8 Xen Setup for Laptop

[Mathew Brown]

On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:33:13 +0000, "Richard W.M. Jones"
<rjones at redhat.com> said:
> Mathew Brown wrote:
> > Hi,
> >   I was considering installing a minimal Fedora 8 setup with the Xen
> >   kernel and then performing most of my work in several different DomUs
> >   (perhaps Fedora of Ubuntu) as well as running Windows in a VMware
> >   setup (don't currently have hardware virtualization support).  Note
> >   that this is on a laptop.  Are there any specific issues that I should
> >   be aware of (such as suspend/resume issues, etc.) and does anyone have
> >   any specific recommendations?  Thank you for your help.
> 
> Xen and laptops aren't really friends with each other.  In particular 
> power management doesn't work so the laptop will run hot and eat 
> batteries, suspend/resume are unlikely to work, and so on.

I remember on the Xen mailing list that they wanted to encourage people
to start using Xen on laptops to help troubleshoot power management
related issues.

> Also it's difficult to mix different hypervisors.  I don't think you can 
> run Xen & VMWare at the same time.
> 
> Have you thought about using qemu instead?  A QEmu guest is just an 
> ordinary Linux process, so much more predictable.  It's a shame that 
> your laptop doesn't have HVM.  What is the processor?


I just rechecked.  I have the HP nc6320 and just came across a post that
says that they released a BIOS update to enable virtualization :)  I
hope to try it out.  But even then, how stable is Windows under Xen (I
plan on running a lot of appliactions and trying to port my current
Windows setup + applications to it).  I was planning on using P2V and
make a VMware virtual machine image of my current setup and then use
that under VMware.  That would definitely be the easier approach.  Also,
Qemu is very very slow.  VirtualBox is a better approach.  However,
neither VirtualBox or Qemu are really what I'm looking at (I've used
both in the past).  Thanks for your help.


> Rich.
> 
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-- 
  Mathew Brown
  mathewbrown at fastmail.fm

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